EA announces the release of a playable demo for Mass Effect 2, also saying to expect the release of the promised Overlord DLC for the sci-fi RPG sequel tomorrow for Windows and Xbox 360 (560 MS points/space bucks/$7.00 USD). The demo is now available for PC and Xbox 360, and here's word on what to expect: "In the demo, players step into the role of Commander Shepard and must escape from a Cerberus space station under siege. Players can jump ahead to a later mission where they must rescue Subject Zero, a hardened, dangerous criminal from a heavily guarded prison ship. Once they play the demo, players will be able to create a save and carry over their character along with the experience points, story decisions, achievements and weapons earned into the full version of the game – picking up right where they left off, on both PC and Xbox 360." The English Windows demo is available for download from AtomicGamer, FanGaming, FilePlanet, and Gamer's Hell. There's also a German language demo on Gamer's Hell and a Spanish-language demo on AtomicGamer. There's also a new "the story so far" trailer (with Mass Effect 1 spoilers) on the Mass Effect 2 Website narrated by the Illusive Man (Martin Sheen). The embedded clip follows.

If by "Watered down tripe" you mean, "Made improvements in every aspect of the game so I didn't want to pull my hair out, or waste my time selling tons of weapons".

Replacing planet exploration with mining was not an improvement. If they wanted to improve planet exploration, they should have added more variety to the planets to make them more interesting. Instead, they just removed exploration entirely. Same thing with inventory. The ME1 inventory system sucked because the interface was poorly designed. In ME2, they could have improved the interface but instead they just removed it entirely.

I fail to see the marketing sense of releasing a demo so late. We all already know ME2 is a great game, I'll be buying ME2 when its $20 or so since I have like 6 games to finish currently. Mean time I guess I can futz around with the demo.

See this makes no sense. Stand by your product and release a demo prior to the full game or at the same time as the full game. While ME2 is an excellent game that I love, and ME1 was as well, it still doesn't make sense to release a demo so late like this. Most companies do it because they know their game sucks or that, according to statistics, it could affect impulse buys.

However the consumer is screwed when it comes to video games. We cannot return opened software, we don't know if it will work on our systems where a demo would help with that, and lastly sometimes there are a flood of games released and we cannot afford them all at once. A demo alleviates this problem.